“The Brazil-born artist has built a collaborative research-focused practice from her base in Los Angeles that addresses connective tissue that links place, history, and aesthetics. Employing moving images, installation, and sculpture, she explores their alternative narratives in both built and natural environments of extractive economies. Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as in her 2017 video Ch’u Mayaa, or more broadly examining a grotesque, postlapsarian world, the artist employs the future perfect language of speculative science to propose ways of seeing our devastated present.” Tossin’s work has been exhibited widely, including in the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2018), and in the Twelfth Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea (2018).As a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University (2017-18), Tossin worked towards the installation Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters) (2018), which became the subject of a solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. The project unfolded into a new exhibition, Future Fossil (2019), commissioned by the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. Tossin holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at theFrye Art Museum in Seattle, take roots among the stars OCT. 7, 2023–JAN.7, 2024
Park McArthur is an artist who experiments with personal and social meanings of debility, delay and dependency under the guidance and instruction of disability. Her work has been described as questioning care alongside questions of autonomy and dependency. Her sculptures and conceptually driven installations are often composed of utilitarian materials such as blocks of foam or a Wikipedia entry. “Although the social and practical dimension of making art varies from piece to piece, I am consistently interested in finding ways of understanding debility and dependency as a generative space. As such, my work often comes from personal experience but seeks to arrive (or join) a space that exceeds the individual person.
Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2019 McArthur joined The Department of Art & Design at Rutgers University The State University of New Jersey as Tepper Family Endowed Chair.
Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link mid century formalism, architectural theory and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.
She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island (New York, NY), the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences (Charleston, WV), the PalaentologicalMuseum (Cortina, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Zuckerman Museum (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene diRosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She is currently a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program.
Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and designer who explores the resonance of genetic cultural memory through the mystical and the mundane. The child of two prolific creators, he developed his practice under the tutelage of his parents, Curtis R. Barnes and Royal Alley-Barnes. He is part of the Black Constellation, a collective that also includes Shabazz Palaces, THEESatisfaction, and Nep Sidhu. Alley-Barnes has exhibited sculpture and films in numerous traditional and new-media-based settings. He has been, and continues to be, instrumental in the creation of seminal cultural spaces in Seattle, including the influential mixed-use space pun(c)tuation, among others. In 2014, Alley-Barnes was the recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in the open medium category. Alley-Barnes lives and works in Seattle.
Markel Uriu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work explores impermanence, maintenance, and the unseen. Drawing from her Japanese and Irish-American heritage, she is particularly interested in liminal spaces, and explores these concepts through ephemeral botanical narratives and two-dimensional work. Her subjects of time, cycles, and cultural interchange have culminated in a fascination with invasive species. Her current work explores the nature of invasive species, their environmental impacts, and their links to humanity, colonialism, and globalization.
Markel received her BA from Whitman College in 2011. She is the recipient of various awards and residencies, most recently the 2018 Amazon Artist in Residence, and the 2016-2017 Artbridge Fellow at Pratt Fine Arts Center. She is a member of the Lion’s Main Art Collective for Queer and Trans Artists, Seattle and SOIL Gallery, Seattle, and has shown throughout the United States.
As an artist and community organizer, I construct immersive, interactive installations to connect diaspora communities. I’m interested in media infrastructure and its role in shaping what is knowable. I create portals for displaced peoples to reintegrate our stories across dimensions, devising passageways for us to connect, hear from, and care for one another. I generate art objects as time-capsules to vault these experiences, questions, and memories in the future. My practice deals with continuance, analog internets, rites of passage, the production of history, and the construction of satellites. Painting and sculpture are my prayer language; laced with vestiges of mediation and hearsay; embedded with questions for another time and place.
BIO (b. 1990) Christopher Paul Jordan integrates virtual and physical public space to form infrastructures for dialogue and self-determination among dislocated people. Jordan’s paintings and sculptures are time-capsules from his work in community. His 7000 sqft panoramic mural from #COLORED2017 is now buried into the walls of the Carpenter’s Union Building in Tacoma where it can only be rediscovered through demolition.
Jordan’s installations and public projects have been implemented internationally including Trinidad and Tobago, Taiwan, and Mexico. His work has been recognized by the Neddy Artist Award in painting, the James W Ray Venture Project Award, the Jon Imber Fellowship, the GTCF Foundation of Art Award, and the Artist Trust Fellowship.
Robert Rhee is a collector of accidents, a rubbernecker. He is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer of collaborative artist projects. He teaches in the interdisciplinary Foundations Program at Cornish College of the Arts.
In his work he pursues situations which are on the precipice of formlessness, where a system is engaged but not controlled. His studio work and writing shape each other as parallel practices. He uses time (duration) to move ideas back and forth between modes: a sculpture conceived like a story, a poem worked on with power tools.
He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. A selected list includes the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul, the Ferdinand Van Dieten Gallery in the Netherlands, the Arario Gallery, Dorsky Gallery for Curatorial Projects, Fisher-Landau Center for the Arts, and White Columns in New York.
His blog, robottree.com, was shortlisted for Creative Capital’s Arts Writers Grant and his writing has been published in art magazines and literary journals such as Art in America, Arcade, Monday: The Journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Heck, and La Norda, and Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters.
Bob Leverich is an architect, sculptor, and craftsman, and a faculty member at The Evergreen State College, where he teaches visual art, craft, and sustainable design. He has building projects, sculpture, and furniture works in public and private collections across the country and in Canada. His architectural experience includes commercial, public, residential, and religious projects, as well as preservation of historic structures.
His sculpture and craft works have addressed expressive and functional themes in a variety of materials. His recent sculpture has focused on carved stone and wood, using iconic landscape and body forms, and includes large, site specific, multi-part public art works in Maine and Washington State. Bob regards drawing as a foundational tool in his working process, and he sees architecture, sculpture, and craft as connected by their substantiality and character as kinesthetic experiences, both in making and in use. Meaning gained through making is fundamental to his work and to his teaching.
Dawn Cerny is a multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle. Her recent works on paper and in sculpture examine the formal articulation of value and power—or lack thereof—through everyday gestures, bodily postures, and personal aesthetic choices. Cerny’s monochromatic sculptural works also evoke racks, chairs, and cabinets of uncertain purpose, at once amplifying and distorting furniture’s connection to the human form. Amassed together within the gallery, they might comprise a domestic arrangement, a showroom, or a crowd of people, alone together in public space. Like Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy—a favorite of the artist’s—Cerny’s sculptures can be seen as an absurdist response to the productive rationalism of modern times, one that both represents and is alienated from everyday life. Cerny’s work has been exhibited at many venues including Henry Art Gallery; Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada; Night Gallery in LA and Derk Eller Gallery in New York.
Wendy Red Star is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State University-Bozeman and her M.F.A from UCLA in 2006. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her exhibitions include shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Hallie Ford Museum, The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2009, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Missoula Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, National Museum of the American Indian-New York, Portland Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bockley Gallery, and Haw Contemporary gallery. She has been a visiting lecturer at a range of respected institutions, including The Banff Centre, CalArts, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Portland State University, Dartmouth Hood Museum, Figge Art Museum, Fairhaven College, Fine Artworks Center-Provincetown, and I.D.E.A. Space-Colorado College.
JOHN FEODOROV
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and Euro-American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land near Whitehorse, NM. The time he spent with his mother and grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon continues to inform and impact his work.
John has been called a conceptual artist, a political artist, as well as a Native American artist, but he is still not sure how to define what he does. His work includes painting, drawing, assemblage, installation, video, music and songwriting. He also has engaged in experimental performance in the past, but not lately. Currently, he writes and performs with his art/pop band, The Almost Faithful.
John’s work as been widely exhibited and has been featured in several publications; most recently in Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard, and Manifestations, edited by Dr. Nancy Marie Mithlo. He was also featured in the first season of the PBS series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century”.
John has also worked with the Seattle-based afterschool arts program, Artscorps, and served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College.
SARA SIESTREEM
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos and American, 1976-) is from the Umpqua River Valley in South Western Oregon. She grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a Master Artist and Educator. She comes from a family of professional artists and educators and her training in both fields began in the home. Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from PSU in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Siestreem is the weaving student of Greg Archuleta, Greg Robinson, and Nan MacDonald. She is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland and her work has been shown in museums and figures in prestigious private and public collections nationally.
Her studio work is multi-disciplinary. Her primary language is painting, but she also works in photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional weaving.
She teaches Foundations in Studio Arts and Indigenous Studies at PSU and Traditional Weaving Practices for The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. She works as a consultant and free lance educator for museums and cultural groups regionally. Siestreem also serves various youth organizations and individuals in the role of mentor, workshop leader, promoter, public speaker and volunteer.
She lives and works exclusively in the arts in Portland, Oregon.
CORWIN CLAIRMONT
Corwin (Corky) Clairmont is a contemporary artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Living in Los Angeles, Corky pursued a contemporary exhibiting artist career as well as teaching and becoming department head of printmaking at the Otis/Parsons Art Institute located in Los Angeles, Ca. Upon his return to Montana in 1984, Corky began administrative work at the newly credited Salish Kootenai College located in Pablo, Montana on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation. This included the creation of the SKC Fine Arts Department and art degree program. Through work as a printmaker, conceptual and installation artist, Corky’s images discuss and explore situations or issues that effect tribal people such as sovereignty, colonization, giving a cultural and historical perspective. Corky’s artwork has been exhibited through out the United States and in several Countries including Germany Norway, New Zealand, France, and most recently at the US Embassy located in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa. Awards have included Ford and National Endowment of the Arts, the Eiteljorg Fellowship Award, and the 2008 Montana Governors Award for Visual Arts. He currently serves on the State Board of the Montana Arts Council.
